Re: BG: Barbara Aland's view on Majority Text

From: Vincent Broman (broman@np.nosc.mil)
Date: Thu Aug 31 1995 - 12:30:53 EDT


terry@bible.acu.edu asked, a few weeks ago:
> On page 155 of Aland and Aland's _The Text of the New Testament, we read:
>
> "In fact, the 'Majority Text"...
> ...may yet prove to hold a multiple significance for the
> history of the text (cf. the high number of type 1/2 readings in a good many
> manuscripts). But Barbara Aland's views on this cannot be tested
> systematically until the critical apparatus of Nestle-Aland26 has been put on
> tape (which is now being done) and been examined by computer from all the
> necessary perspectives."
>
> Does anyone on this listserver know what Barbara Aland's views that are
> referred to here but not explained are exactly?

This mention of Barbara Aland's views was not present in the 1st edition,
so perhaps they are new. I do not know what the views are, but even if they
are eventually tested "from all the necessary perspectives" the test won't be
repeatable, because the Munster folks don't release their machine-readable data.

The 1993 Text und Textwert volumes for Acts (the latest installment from
Munster) discusses the high number (how high is high?) of "1/2" readings in
the Apostolos MSS. The thoughts presented there (not necessarily of B Aland,
perhaps just her students) were fundamentally confused in two respects:
1: they seemed not to be aware of the critical effect of sampling bias, and
2: they seemed not to be aware of the circular reasoning underlying
their approach of measuring MS "Wert" by means of similarity to NA26.

This latter consideration was illuminated by the excellent article
    Ehrman, Bart, "A Problem of Textual Circularity: The Alands on
    the Classification of NT MSS," in _Biblica_ 70 (1989) 377-88.
Ehrman already mentioned this article in his pleasantly self-effacing way
on b-greek, but it's worth a toot from my horn in addition.

Vincent Broman, code 786 Bayside Email: broman@nosc.mil
Naval Command Control and Ocean Surveillance Center, RDT&E Div.
San Diego, CA 92152-6147, USA Phone: +1 619 553 1641



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